Truly a long thread about portable repeaters, so I thought that I should throw in my two cents;
I've built several of these out of ex-PMR MPT1327 trunking mobile radios; http://gallery.lakki.iki.fi/R58_portable_UHF_repeater The radio goes with a ham radio firmware which has advanced repeater functions, including timers, courtesy tones, CWID, etc. The hardware supports external DTMF and CTCSS decoders, CTCSS encoding is built-in. The radio has built-in duplexers and they perform OK for a low power repeater for 5MHz split in range 441-443MHz TX and 446-448MHz RX with 10W power to a matched antenna. It runs OK with couple of watts also with a 1/4 whip attached directly to the radio. Here's one in action at Belton Hamfest 2004: http://gallery.lakki.iki.fi/USA2004_Belton_hamfest/IMG_2341 You can get references about these from the Armadillo guys in Houston and Dallas, there are some of these in use there. I can provide such repeaters, please contact me directly if interrested. 73 Erik OH2LAK
